Social Media, Blogs and RSS

Event Detail

Thursday, March 6, 2014

WAPPP Research Seminar Series with Jooa Julia Lee

Virtually all normative and descriptive models of moral judgment
view an agent's gender as irrelevant to judgments of moral
permissibility — whether an action such as sacrificing one life to
save five others is carried out by a man or a woman does not
qualify its appropriateness. However, we demonstrate that people
expect men to be more utilitarian, than women when resolving moral
dilemmas. Accordingly, they find utilitarian behavior more
appropriate when carried out by male agents. This research suggests
that moral judgment is not only evaluative in scope, but also
inferential. Individuals view behavior as a signal about character,
and because of their prior beliefs about male and female
characteristics, they arrive at different judgments when the same
behavior is carried out by male and female agents. This paper
discusses the organizational implications of the gender bias in
moral decision-making.